Part II: Talking


Chapter List

Being Stuck
Dictating
Talking Politely
Speaking Up
Only Talking

Part Overview

In 1993, after i left shell and moved to South Africa, I started Generon Consulting. My partners were Joseph Jaworski, who by then had also finished his assignment at Shell, and Bill O'Brien, the former president of Hanover Insurance. Later Otto Scharmer of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined us as a research partner. The Mont Fleur approach became well known, and teams of people all over the worldin and across companies, governments , and civil society organizationsasked us to help them work on their most important and difficult problems.

Through this work, I gradually, over the next decade , pieced together an answer to my second question, which I came to think of as: How can we solve tough problems peacefully? The answer turned out to be both simple and practical: by opening up our talking and listening. With that insight, I can look back and see the key pattern across all the projects my colleagues and I have worked on. At one extreme, some projects were characterized by completely closed talking and listening, and these ended up getting stuck or getting dealt with by force. Other projects were characterized by completely open talking and listening, and these succeeded in creating new realities. Most projects fell somewhere between these two extremes. I have laid out the stories in this book in this opening-up order, rather than chronologically. Each chapter that follows illustrates and explains one degree of greater openness than the chapter before. This progression offers a theory and practice of how to solve tough problems.

Through this work, I also gradually pieced together how to do my job as a process facilitator. A friend once sent me an email with this message: "How does one learn good judgment? Experience. And how does one gain experience? Bad judgment." My hard-won experience has taught me that I also am least effective when I am closed and most effective when I am open. But this simple opening-up turned out to be far more subtle and challenging than I would ever have imagined.




Solving Tough Problems(c) An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
Solving Tough Problems(c) An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 53

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